UIC students help build upcoming museum exhibit about Latinos  

When a long-planned exhibit celebrating Chicago’s Latino communities opens at the Chicago History Museum in October, the contributions of many UIC students and faculty will be on display.  

The exhibition, “Aquí en Chicago,” will span nearly 4,000 square feet across two galleries to represent the diversity of Chicago’s Latino people and their history. The idea came from high school students at the Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, also known as the Rudy Lozano Academy, who saw a need to represent Latinos in the city’s largest history museum.  

UIC students served as interns in a pilot program that allowed them to work at the museum during the academic year. While they have since graduated, their research will be featured in the exhibition.  

One intern on the project was Nez Castro, who graduated in December with a history degree. He helped create an interactive collection of crowdsourced photographs called the Digital Communities’ Scrapbook. Visitors will be able to flip through the scrapbook in the gallery and it will be accessible online once the exhibition launches Oct. 25. The museum is currently accepting submissions. 

“I got to learn the stories of individuals,” Castro said. “It was really cool to get to know the community and the city in that context, which is something I hadn’t done before.”  

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For the past year and a half, Castro met with people across the city to scan photographs and other mementos for the scrapbook. His job was to research these contributions by interviewing the donors and writing and translating captions for photos.  

Castro has continued working on the project even after graduating. His goal was to invite people to participate so that as many Latino voices as possible could be included.  

Castro said he would like to continue working in museums. The most enjoyable part of his role was conducting research, tracking down photographs and meeting people, he added.   

He learned that even though people consider Latinos a monolith, there is nearly endless diversity in Latino culture, customs and countries, diversity maintained by Latinos in Chicago. He himself is Mexican and Bolivian.  

“A lot of people lump stuff together because there are some cultural similarities between different countries,” Castro said. “But it’s cool when you see different businesses catering to different ethnicities. Rather than being a generic Latin American food market, there’s a Salvadorian one, there’s the Ecuadorian snack shop, there’s the Honduran restaurant. It’s cool to see that.”  

In a blog post he wrote for the museum, he details meeting business owners, including a family who owns Dulcelandia, a well-known candy and party supply chain that caters to Latino families, and meeting artists from Chicago who have devoted their lives to making and preserving community art.  

“So far, I have traveled 600+ miles within Chicago, speaking to business owners, politicians, artists, nonprofit workers, and storefront employees. Through this effort, I have borrowed 142 images in addition to those already in the CHM collection,” Castro wrote.  

One focus of the exhibit will be the social justice work of students at the Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, which was originally named after UIC alum Rudy Lozano. Lozano, a Mexican American activist and labor organizer, was murdered in 1983.  

Initially stalled during the pandemic, the exhibition project gained traction after Elena Gonzales took the helm in 2021 and decided to center the exhibit around the students’ activism, which continued the work of their activist predecessors, including Lozano.   

“It looks at all different types of work, from more overt activist work to linguistic and cultural maintenance to business and family life as different ways of resisting colonialism and racism around the area,” said Gonzales, the museum’s curator of civic engagement and social justice.   

Among the first advisors on the project was Rosa Cabrera, executive director of the Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center at UIC. Gonzales said Cabrera, who has been a longtime mentor to her, “is a vital voice in the community locally.”   

Another UIC staff member who advises on the exhibit is Lilia Fernández, a history professor at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at UIC is also participating by lending ceramics from the Hull-House kilns.  

“We’ve had folks from UIC involved from the beginning in multiple capacities,” Gonzales said. “I reached out to them and asked for their collaboration because they are experts who I trust, and I know that they had different pieces of the puzzle that could help us be successful and could help us reach all over these communities.”  

In addition to Castro, former UIC interns included Katherine Quiroa and Algae Guzmán.  

Quiroa graduated in the spring with a master’s degree in Latin American and Latino studies. She focused her research on how the Mexican population in the area around UIC was impacted when the university first began as the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus in 1965. She also researched the activism of local community members, research that will be part of the “Aquí en Chicago” exhibit.   

“It was eye-opening — the amount of detail, care and knowledge that goes into each and every position at the museum,” Quiroa said. “Elena and our other supervisor, Curator Jojo Galván, were great mentors who I learned a great deal from and taught me a deeper appreciation of the process of researching and conserving information, artwork, and much more.”